I'll See You to Shore

by Educated Guess

Rating: everyone
Tags: Slice of Life, Original Character, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Romance
Length: 5193

After 500 years with not a single sighting, a wounded sea-pony washes ashore in Tall Tale, and changes the town and its citizens - one, in particular - forever.

Surf-on-the-Shore-Brings-Sand-to-the-Depths is a sea-pony. This, in itself, would not be strange, if any other sea-ponies had been seen in Equestria for the past 500 years.

Why, then, has he washed ashore now, covered in what look like hundreds of shark bites?

Written for the February Writing Contest of the World-Building Alliance - although, frankly, I'm not sure I've done enough world-building to even qualify. It started out as a more comedic endeavor, referencing the Gen. 1 song "Call Upon the Seaponies" from "Rescue at Midnight Castle" at every available opportunity, but it evolved into a romance after I listened to this song about ten-dozen times.

It is what it is. Inspiration struck, and I hammered it out. C'est la vie.

Published 2013-02-12 23:30:01 UTC
Last updated 2013-02-12 23:30:01 UTC

Washed Up on the Rocks

Triplicate Form liked Sundays. Saturday was the town’s market day, and being, as she was, the Adjutant of the Mayor, she was always buried under receipts, trade agreements, shipping manifests, buyers complaining about the terrible quality of their neighbor’s wares, and sellers complaining about the terrible quality of their neighbor’s attitudes. But Sunday, the day after, was always very quiet. It was the day when she was supposed to finish filing and cataloguing all the paperwork from the day before, but she rarely did - it was simply too tempting to sit, and rest, and enjoy the brief reprieve from village life.

So you can understand how upset she was when, early one Sunday, village life came bursting through the door of Town Hall, bringing with it a sudden gust of stormy wind that blew away the thirty-eight paper cranes she had folded in the past hour, as well as a half-finished thirty-ninth, and the remaining pile of blank contracting request forms.

“Where’s the Mayor?” shouted Mrs. Tart, with her usual over-abundant excitement. She seemed not to notice the papers and birds swirling down around her.

“Out,” replied Triplicate, grumpily. “And could you please shut the door? You’re letting rain in.”

“Out?” Mrs. Tart screeched, ignoring her request. “What do you mean, out?”

“Just that. Out. He’s gone on a vacation to Galloping Gorge - said he’d be back when ‘his mojo was realigned.’”

Mrs. Tart stomped in frustration. “That good-for-nothing feather-brain! So charming and sophisticated, but he’s never there when you actually need him! Fine, I guess you’ll have to do.”

Triplicate’s ears perked up in fear. She didn’t particularly like doing. “Do what?”

“Be a representative of our town, of course!” Mrs. Tart bellowed, as though the answer had been obvious. “Doc Thread's house, come as quick as you can!”

With that, she left, slamming the door behind her.

Triplicate had regretted her decision as soon as she had stepped outside.

The storm was even fiercer than it had seemed from looking out the window. Her hooded, woollen overcoat, as well as the plain blue coat beneath it, had been soaked through before she had made it halfway across the square. The only things that had kept her from turning around immediately and going back inside were her curiosity, and the fact that Doctor Thread's house contained a very large fireplace, which, though archaic, was, in her opinion, vastly superior in warming ability to the fancy, modern, magic-powered heating system that the Mayor had had installed in Town Hall.

And so it was that Triplicate Form came to knock on the thick, wooden door of Doctor Thread, which was opened hastily by Mrs. Tart.

“Well, I’ll be damned. I half-expected to have to go back out and drag you here.”

Triplicate grunted in thanks at the backhooved compliment. She slung her coat onto the hook by the door, and retreated, shivering, towards the fireplace, which was, quite thankfully, roaring. Mrs. Tart knocked with uncharacteristic gentleness on the door to the bathroom.

“Doc?” she all but whispered, which somehow was even more jarring than her shouts.

“Yez?” the doctor’s thick, slurring voice replied.

“Miss Form is here.”

“Ah, goot. One moment.”

Suture Thread the unicorn was something of a celebrity in Tall Tale. He had arrived as a traveling physician several years ago. At the time, the town had lacked a permanent doctor, and when the Mayor had offered the position to Doctor Thread, he had readily accepted. The doctor didn’t much like to talk about his past, saying only that he used to be “a surgeon in Canterlot”, and this enigmaticism, combined with his strange accent and large, intimidating form, had quickly led the children of the town to concoct a thrilling series of accounts in which Suture Thread was some sort of mad scientist, banished from the capital for performing secret, terrible experiments that were beyond equine comprehension.

Which was, of course, ridiculous.

A few minutes passed before the doctor emerged from the bathroom, closing the door carefully behind him.

“Meez Form,” he said, bowing towards the dripping, sea-blue, black-haired earth pony. “Thank you for comink.”

Triplicate bowed back, awkwardly. “I’m not quite sure what I’m here for, Doc.”

The doctor grinned. As innocent as the gesture was, it sent shivers down Triplicate’s spine.

“I tink is best you see yourself, yez?”

Triplicate had never been in the doctor’s bathroom before, but it was, predictably, cramped, like the rest of the cottage, and was lit by a single hanging firefly lantern. Most of the space was dominated by an oversized ornate bathtub. Triplicate vaguely recalled processing the shipping and contracting paperwork for its installation, since it had been the Mayor’s special gift to Doctor Thread on (what he claimed was) his 35th birthday.

But the bathtub was not particularly interesting when compared to what it currently held.

Triplicate’s first thought was that the whole situation was some sort of trick. It would not have been the first time she had been the butt of a joke in Tall Tale. However, she quickly realized that if this was a joke, Mrs. Tart and Doctor Thread would have to have found a dead earth pony, a medium-sized porpoise, and several assorted fish parts, all of a matching, turquoise color, and have sewn them together - and while that thought was mostly possible, as well as terribly disturbing, and it certainly looked as though the creature in the tub was being held together by stitches, the cadaver resulting from such a procedure would most certainly not have been breathing, let alone turning its head to look at her.

Triplicate stared, speechless and open-mouthed, her heart rattling in her chest.

What appeared to be a sea-pony stared back.

“Tuna Net und Lobster Cage brought heem to me,” Suture Thread interjected from behind. “Dey found heem washt up on de rocks. Verreh badly hurt - looks like shahrks. Two-hundret-und-zeventeen stitches, together.”

Triplicate turned to the doctor. “Can he talk?”

“Yes, I can,” said the sea-pony.

“Oh,” said Triplicate, sheepishly turning back to the figure in the tub. “I’m sorry, that was rude of me. Um...” She racked her brains for the lessons on greeting foreign dignitaries that had been required learning in secretarial school, but quickly abandoned the endeavor, and instead simply extended her hoof. “My name is Triplicate Form, Mayor-Adjutant of Tall Tale. You are?”

The sea-pony regarded the hoof with no small amount of skepticism, but eventually, he lifted his own hoof out of the water and shook it, awkwardly.

“My name is Surf-On-The-Shore-Brings-Sand-To-The-Depths,” said Surf-On-The-Shore-Brings-Sand-To-The-Depths. “But I am usually called Suos.”

“I can see why,” Triplicate joked, attempting to break the ice - but the ice was much thicker than it had seemed at first glance. She cleared her throat, and continued. “And, uh... are you what I think you are?”

For the first time since Triplicate had entered the room, Suos smiled, ever-so-slightly - and for some indiscernible reason, his smile set her heart a-flutter.

“I think I am.”

Mrs. Tart may have been the best maker of blackberry pies this side of Manehattan, but as sweet as she was, if there was one thing in which she had absolutely no talent, nor desire to improve, it was the art of keeping secrets. In less than a day, the whole of the town had known of the strange and wondrous creature from the sea, and where Dr. Thread, who normally made house calls, was usually host to only one or two visitors a week, his home had suddenly been surrounded by ponies who had conveniently found that they didn’t have anything better to be doing.

Of course, Suture Thread had lived in Tall Tale long enough to know how to deal with gossips and spies. He had dissipated the initial crowds with tales of a mysterious sickness that plagued the beast, combined with warnings of the very, extremely real possibility of the disease spreading to ponies like he and they, and though the occasional gaggle of housemares would still watch the doctor’s comings and goings suspiciously from the far corner of the square, the story had seemed to stick, leaving Dr. Thread and Triplicate Form free to talk to Suos, and nurse him back to health.

“Do sea-ponies have their own language?” Triplicate asked, her shoe-pen scribbling away on the already-half-filled scroll.

Suos paused halfway through chewing a strip of dried seaweed.

“Why do you ask?”

“Well, I’m just... surprised that you can speak Ponnish so well.”

The sea-pony shrugged, and swallowed. “Shoobedoo and Ponnish do have common roots, somewhere in the depths of time. Even considering the difference in medium, quite a bit is translatable, just with common sense. And one tends to do a good amount of sensing when they do what I do.”

“And what do you do?”

Suos took another ravenous bite of seaweed before answering. “I am a Waverider. Or, at least... I was.” His eyes fell for a moment, but where Triplicate expected something like sadness, or regret, she saw only dissapointment.

“A... Waverider?”

“When the sea-ponies stopped interacting with other races, and retreated into the depths - it was four- or five-hundred years ago, now - the Order of the Waveriders was founded to keep that separation in place. And we have. We patrol the shorelines - we follow ships, and divert them away from the Coral Towers. Sometimes, if a fisherpony sees a bit too much, we...” He bowed his head in shame, letting the remains of the kelp fall from his hooves and plop into the bathwater. “Well, we make sure that they are never heard from again.”

Triplicate’s hoof ceased scrawling, and her jaw dropped. The parts of her brain that had not frozen in shock began to recall all of the disappearances at sea that had occurred during her lifetime, and wondered how many of them had been natural, and how many had been due to Waveriders like Suos, or perhaps even Suos himself.

Suos meekly met the adjutant’s stunned gaze with his own somber, guilt-ridden eyes. “I am not proud of the things I have done. But believe me when I tell you that that is not my life anymore. Not with what I know now.”

A burst of curiosity revived Triplicate’s jaw muscles. “What... what do you know now?”

Suos shook his head. “That, I cannot tell you. It is a matter for the Queen, and the Queen alone. But... I can tell you that it is a lie. One of the greatest lies ever told, in all the lands and waters of the earth. A lie under which I, and all my kind, have labored for generations. A lie that nearly cost me my life.”

“What?” asked Triplicate, confused. “But... you were attacked by sharks, weren’t you?”

“Sharktooth spears,” Suos said simply. “A technique we developed long ago for creating ‘accidents’. Normally, we are much more careful about making it look convincing - but in my case, I don’t think they really cared.”

“You were attacked by your own kind?”

“Ambushed, on my way back to Seacily. Stabbed, stripped, and left for dead. I do not know how they knew I knew, but they did - so, as much as I am grateful for all that you have done for me, I cannot take the risk of sharing with you my burden.”

That might have been the end of that thread of conversation, but one question, above all others, burned at the forefront of Triplicate’s mind.

“...Why are you telling me all this?”

Now, it was Suos’ turn to be shocked, as much at Triplicate as he suddenly was at himself, as he considered the answer. He watched the tiny piece of kelp slowly drift away from him, like a ship trying to escape some terrible leviathan.

“For longer than any of us can remember, every sea-pony has been raised being told that the outside world is vile - dangerous - that the beings who live in it are never to be trusted.” He let out a small chuckle at the now-apparent absurdity of the idea. “You would hardly believe the stories they told us about you, stories of... tyranny, and hatred, and betrayal. But now... so much of what I thought I knew about my world has been shattered - and the rest is sure to fall with it.” He gave Triplicate a weak smile. “I suppose that, in the end, I tell you because I seek forgiveness, though I know it is not mine to seek, nor yours to give.”

Triplicate returned the smile warmly, and felt a sudden urge to lay her hoof on his shoulder. She quickly shook the thought from her mind, and instead settled on saying, “Well, I’d say you’ve made a good start.”

Either sea-ponies had a supernatural ability to regenerate, or Suos was successfully disguising just how much pain he was in - but either way, it had soon come time to remove the last of the two-hundred-and-seventeen stitches, and relocate the Waverider out of the doctor’s bathtub, and back into the waves. Though he had assured them that spending his nights away from the ocean would not be detrimental to his health, Triplicate had already made preparations for him to stay in the old smuggler’s hideout just up the coast, a nice, abandoned, and, most importantly, hidden cove, where Triplicate was certain Suos could live, practice, and regain his strength, withoutbeing discovered by the townsponies.

They had snuck him out under cover of darkness the night before, and she had made triply certain that they hadn’t been followed. With any luck, she could continue to interview him, and the townsponies would all forget that anything had ever happened. Which reminded her -

Where were all the townsponies?

The square seemed deserted, full of half-built stalls and lined with wide-flung doors, which, combined with the fact that it was a Saturday, was nothing short of disconcerting - possibly even worrying. Suddenly, out of the corner of her eye, Triplicate caught a glimpse of Flash Bulb, the Daily Scallop’s staff photographer, slipping into the DS editorial building, only to reemerge moments later carrying one of his many cameras, and dashing back the way he had come - towards the coast. Triplicate, her interest piqued, followed him.

As she approached, she wasn’t sure how she felt about what she saw. On one hoof, judging by the smile on his face, Suos was very much enjoying playing in the shallows with the fillies and colts, (being, at various times, a mount, a monster, a boat-ride, a fellow knight in a giant stick-fight, and a very powerful and reliable springboard) and he obviously didn’t mind that the entirety of the town had gathered around to watch him do so - but on the other hoof, he was doing so.

“Suos?” she called - but her voice was drowned out by the combined whispers and murmurings of a hundred mares and stallions.

“Suos!” she tried again, trotting closer - but her cry was outdone by a filly, screaming in delighted fear when the sea-pony pinned her to the sand, and tickled her ferociously.

Frustrated, she finally resorted to a page from Mrs. Tart’s book, which, though it has sadly never been written, would be titled “How to Make Ponies, Especially Ponies Who Are Doing Something They Should Not Be Doing, Pay Attention to You”.

“SURF-ON-THE-SHORE-BRINGS-SAND-TO-THE-DEPTHS!”

The crowd jumped, turned, and parted hastily, not wanting to be caught anywhere between her wrath and its intended target. Though the children around him had frozen in instinctual fear of the motherly shout, Suos himself was entirely unaffected, meeting her fiery gaze with his equally mischievous grin.

“Miss Form!” he replied jovially, as she stormed up the beach towards him. “And here I thought we were past such formalities.”

“What are you doing?” she asked, as though the answer hadn’t been obvious.

“Well, currently, I am reminding the good Mister Cage, standing behind you over there, that I told him that that was the first thing you would say to me, and that I will hold him to his debt on that regard, in the future—”

Triplicate turned a baleful eye on Lobster Cage, and the gambler quickly pulled his hat down over his eyes.

“—but moments before you arrived, I was simply regaling these fine fillies and gentlecolts—” Suos gestured to the foals around him, who, bolstered by his flippant rebellion, nodded with their best impressions of rich, haughty snobbishness. “—with the tales of how I acquired some of my many splendid scars.”

“...What?” Triplicate was caught off guard, especially since she knew for a fact that there was only one tale regarding those scars, and that she didn’t consider it to be especially appropriate for children - not even the disproportionately morbid children of Tall Tale.

“Yeah!” exclaimed Dread Knot, running up to Suos’ tail, and examining the arrangements of marks. “Like - like, uh... Like this one!” The colt pointed to a seemingly-random line amongst a cluster of four others. “He got this one when he was fighting the Great Eel of the Basalt Rift, right?”

“That’s right!” Suos said with pride, patting Dread Knot on the head with his tail fin.

“An’, an’, an’ ‘e got da wun on ‘is chest wen ‘e wuz fight’n Gem’ni da Watah Dwagon, wit onwy two hoovsh!” squealed Daisy Jones, the little gap-toothed filly who was still lying underneath the sea-pony’s legs.

“He’s only got two hooves,” pointed out Keel Hall.

“Oh.. ummmmm...” Daisy tapped her chin with her hoof thoughtfully, then quickly rectified the situation. “Wit onwy ‘is tayow!”

The other children seemed to approve of this revision, and enthusiastically agreed.

Where Triplicate had been burning with indignant rage, she now bubbled with dumbfounded laughter. Here she had thought that some measure of chance, or maybe even destiny, was what had brought Suos to their town - that perhaps, the storm had blown him to her because she had some part to play in his story - but in fact, it was merely another case of the infamous and oft-joked-about Curse of Tall Tale. Whatever else Suos was, he was also, apparently, a storyteller - and it was a well-known fact among those that lived here that no weaver of fancy, in the earth, sea, or sky, could avoid being drawn to Tall Tale at some point in their life.

“I thought I told you to stay hidden,” she half-chided and half-giggled, in a last, half-hearted attempt to reproach him.

“We have stayed hidden for five-hundred years.” He set his hoof on hers gently, and smiled. “I think it is about time we came out to play, do not you?”

Triplicate Form liked Sundays. She also liked Tuesdays and Thursdays, since she had allocated time on those days to go down to the beach and talk to Suos. Actually, she usually ended up doing that anyway, no matter what day it was. It was a phenomenon unprecedented in the history of Tall Tale, but the grumpy, snippy, and reclusive Triplicate Form had recently been enjoying every day - even the chaos of Saturdays.

She brought the sea-pony his breakfasts early in the morning. He had recovered an incredible amount of his strength, and had re-implemented his normal morning practice regimen - which, though he constantly assured all watchers of its strictness and difficulty, looked, to most of them, like he was splashing about for four hours. When the sun was high, she brought him his lunches, and if she was not completely buried in all the paperwork she had neglected for the past few days, she would join the audience that had learned to gather around that time.

He would tell them of the ocean - about the immense and sparkling Pearl Towers of Seacily - about the incomparable beauty of a sunset at sea, with clear skies, and not a hill in sight, all around - about the myth of the dark and terrible R’lyeh, a corpse of a city that lay hidden deep within the crags of the ocean floor - about the ancient capital of Alanis, whose original name and makers had long since been lost to the waves.

Triplicate would stay past all the others - past the mothers who left at the turn of twilight to prepare their evening meals - past the foals who begged and pleaded to be allowed to stay for just a few more minutes - past Mrs. Tart, who would bring something out for their dinner, and wonder whether either of them could see what was happening as clearly as she, or, more likely, anypony with half an eyeball, could - and when it was just the two of them, the Adjutant and the Waverider, it would be her turn.

She would tell him of the land - about Canterlot, the City on the Mountain - about the princesses that ruled there, and controlled the day and night - about the Everfree Forest, a place that refused all rule and guidance, where monsters lurked around every corner - about the small town of Ponyville, wherein lived the six heroes who had cleansed and vindicated Princess Luna, and sealed Discord, the Master of Chaos, in stone - about the newly-reemerged Crystal Empire, whose light and love shone all across the world.

If the sky was clear, they would huddle for warmth against the chill sea breeze, Suos’ tail wrapping around her, and together, they would search for stories among the stars. Triplicate always pushed herself to try and stay awake longer than Suos, but she never could, and she would wake up the next morning with a blanket carefully wrapped around her, sand in her mane, and the light of dawn glinting off of the misty water.

Then, one day, a few weeks after the sea-pony had first revealed himself to the town, Suos wasn’t on the beach when Triplicate brought him his breakfast. He had never been even the slightest bit off-schedule before, but she supposed that not even Suos was perfect. She waited. Half an hour later, he wasn’t there, and in another thirty minutes, when she came back to check after feeding his breakfast to Mr. Watering Hole’s chickens, he was still nowhere to be seen.

Triplicate’s surprise began to turn to worry, and she quickly trotted down the beach to the smuggler’s cove. She stepped through the vine-ridden side entrance, emerged from the tunnel into the main chamber, and looked around.

There was the old dock, decaying and barnacle-crusted. There were the piles of empty crates and barrels that had been left behind years ago, after the Coast Guard had raided, and taken everything worth taking. There was Suos’ bedroll, lent to him by Doctor Thread. But there was no Suos, and there was one thing that had not been there before - a note, left laying on an old card table.

It read:

Triplicate-

Gone to fetch something of mine. Will be back by tomorrow.

-Sotsbsttd

Triplicate narrowed her eyes. In her experience, only the guilty left notes. After a quick trip back to Town Hall to grab some paperwork she needed to catch up on, she sat herself down at the card table, lit a candle, and waited.

Four hours later, the sun had reached its peak and begun to fall. Two hours after that, she finished the work she had brought, and began to doodle in the blank back pages of her accounting ledger. She ran out of space just as the sun was starting to set, lit her fifth candle, and moved to the margins of the pages that had already been filled with names and numbers.

She didn’t know when she had fallen asleep, but she certainly knew when she was awoken. Her candle had been reduced to a puddle hours ago, and whatever scraping or banging she made in her jump to wakefulness was drowned out by its cause - a sudden clatter of jumbled, hollow metal on stone. She searched for the source of the noise, and her eyes fell on a shadowy figure that sat on the edge of the moonlit cove - half pony, half fish, and, as far as she could tell from the occasional glint of silver, donning armor.

She approached slowly, careful to make as little noise as possible. She needn’t have bothered - the light clanking of metal plates and the scraping of tightening buckles easily masked whatever slight clops she made as she moved down the bank. It was hard to tell from this distance, but many of the pieces looked like they were adorned with gold filigree that twisted along the armor in intricate and mysterious lines. As ornate as they were, however, they carried just as many scars and scratches as Suos himself now did.

Just as she was about to reach him, he pulled the chin-strap of his helmet tight, and jumped back down into the water. When he surfaced, she finally spoke.

“You were just going to leave?”

He froze, and slowly turned to face her. He didn’t look like Suos anymore. The sadness in his eyes was alien, and the helmet, the chestplate, the small trident slung across his back - these were things that the Suos she knew, Suos the Storyteller, would never have touched, let alone worn.

Triplicate expected to have to wait for an answer, but it appeared that he had prepared himself for this moment.

“I was afraid of saying goodbye,” he said.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because if I had to say goodbye, I would not be able to.”

She tried desperately to think of something, anything, to say, but her mind refused to let go of that one eternal question.

“Why?” she asked again, tears beginning to run unbidden down her face.

Suos sighed. “Believe me, if I could, I would gladly spend the rest of my days here - and someday yet, perhaps I shall. But I cannot abandon the rest of my kind to their fate.”

Triplicate lowered her gaze to the rocks beneath her hooves. If they had not already been wet with salt-water, her own slow-dripping supply would soon have done the job.

“How long?” she whispered hoarsely.

Suos shook his head. “I do not know. I could be back in three days, or I might be about to start a war that will last three decades. But...”

It happened all too quickly. She heard Suos pull himself out of the water, felt him gently lift her chin with his hoof, and suddenly, he was kissing her. Her eyes widened in shock, then quickly fluttered closed in ecstasy, squeezing out an even greater flood. It was the first time she had ever been kissed, but at that moment, every fiber of her being burned with the intense and singular desire that it not be her last.

Suos withdrew slightly, and looked at her solemnly. “I will wait for you, if you will wait for me.”

This time, as a sign of her agreement to the terms, it was she that kissed him.

Excerpt from “The Reference Guide of Obscure History, Vol. XVII” by Dr. Top Shelf

Most Equestrians today know of the Alanian Dominion, but chances are good that if you’re not a sea-pony, and you don’t live in the fishing village of Tall Tale, you’ve never heard of General Surf-on-the-Shore-Brings-Sand-to-the-Depths - or, as he was more commonly known, Suos. As with every other entry, I’ll be giving him far less attention than he deserves - but, if what you see here interests you, I recommend reading “Washed Up On The Rocks”, a biography co-written by the General himself and his wife, Triplicate Form.

Suos was born in the city of Seacily, son of Nowa (No-Wave-Breaks-Against-Water), a ventsmith, and Scawas (Scallops-With-Anchovy-Sauce), one of the local Coral-Lord’s many house chefs. He was raised in a similar manner to most sea-pony children, and became a Waverider at the age of 23 (See: Alanian Dominion Foreign Policy, Pre-Liberation).

His real story began when he single-hoofedly discovered the fact that the then-current Queen of Alanis, Queen Tedaris (The-Depths-Are-Immune-to-the-Sun), was actually a lamia - a shape-shifting, mind-controlling demoness - who had been faking the deaths and coronations of Alanian queens for several centuries. (See: “The Complete Equestrian Bestiary” by Rough Estimate; article “Lamia”) She had used her powers and false authority to keep the sea-ponies cut off from the outside world, creating a personal kingdom, and using the sea-ponies like toys.

Needless to say, this revelation shattered Suos’ views on the world, and Tedaris could not afford to let this knowledge spread. A few days after his discovery, a detachment of Waveriders under Tedaris’s control assaulted Suos on his usual patrol, wounding him near-fatally. Fortunately, a fierce storm blew him ashore near the town of Tall Tale, where the local doctor brought him back from the brink of death. By all accounts, Suos and then-Mayor-Adjutant Triplicate Form were smitten with each other almost instantly, though reasons vary as to why.

When Suos had recovered, he returned to Alanis in secret. He spread what he knew to those few of his comrades that he knew he could trust, and began constructing a plot to defame and dethrone Tedaris. But their numbers grew too large - soon, Tedaris had discovered their plans, and what had been a covert operation quickly escalated into all-out civil war. It was a long and bloody four years before the final battle, when Suos and the Freedom Fighters drove Tedaris out of the Bastion of the Basalt Rift, and out of Alanian waters, once and for all. To this day, the lamia is at large, somewhere out in the Western Sea.

Most sea-ponies thought that Suos deserved to be crowned King, but he adamantly refused. Instead, he helped to assemble a Provisional Parliament that would rule the Dominion until such a time as the last true Queen’s least-distant descendant could be traced. As of this writing, no such heiress has been found, and signs of the lamia’s secret elimination of those bloodlines over the years are abundant. (See: Alanian Dominion Governmental Structure, Post-Liberation)

When he had stabilized his own people, he returned to Equestria and offered an alliance. After a few days of undisclosed negotiations, Princess Celestia and the Provisional Parliament both signed, and the treaty was cemented by Suos’ marriage to now-Mayor Triplicate Form. (See: The Treaty of Smokey Mountain) In the coming years, the Dominion and its warriors would prove to be incredibly useful allies, turning the tide of many a battle in the Pelleponysian War, and drastically reducing the rampant piracy and smuggling of the Western Coast.

Suos is now retired, and currently lives with his wife and three sons in Tall Tale. It is said that his favorite pastime is telling stories, especially to children. The nights when he takes the stage at the local tavern are highly attended events, and best of all, they’re free - not including drinks, of course.